Is Classic raiding really harder than LFR?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
1

Hi everyone.

This question often comes to my mind: Is classic really harder then BFA?

I often watch people saying that classic is harder and that people who play BFA are casuals.

Even I’m planning to play Classic, with the information I have, I don’t think Classic is harder than BFA.

On https://www.method.gg/raid-history there is a list of WF Raid Boss Kills.

For Onyxia, https://youtu.be/3WHdCCE5HHk they don’t have the WF video, but that video was when Onyxia was current content.

I had the patience to watch only 15 minutes of that video. It is a Shaman POV.

Save a very few heals, the shaman uses only one skill Lightning Bolt.
The whole fight was LB, LB, LB, watch Netflix to refill mana bar, LB, LB, LB, watch Netflix to refill mana bar, LB, LB, LB, watch Netflix to refill mana bar, LB, LB, LB, watch Netflix to refill mana bar, LB, LB, LB.

Where is that difficult? Is it even harder than LFR?

I’m guessing I’m gonna have good times playing Classic, not because it is harder, but because it is the easiest version of WoW I ever played.

  • Using only one skill isn’t harder than using proper rotation and CDs.
  • Stop DPSing so you don’t get aggro isn’t hard.
  • Auto attack for hours waiting for mana/rage/energy isn’t hard.
  • Walking from Darkshore to Onyxia Lair after a wipe isn’t hard.
  • Repeating the same 5 man dungeon 100x to get an item isn’t hard.
  • Attacking 10 mobs, one by one, using only one skill isn’t harder than pulling all 10 and popping CDs.

It will be a great experience, but:

  • No one is gonna read quest texts. I’m sure there will be an AAP version for Classic.
  • There will be no better social experience on Classic than on BFA. The restriction for auto-accepting groups was removed recently. So, there will be add-ons that verify your current quest log and automatically check people around. If they have the same quest, they will be invited to your group and automatically be accepted. The only difference is the lack of cross-realms groups.
  • Group Finder is out, oQueue and Raider.io are in. Some tool like oQueue is being developed somewhere to help people finding groups and something like IO is coming to check who knows how to play.
  • DBM will still be teaching people how to play.

Is there anything I’m missing about it?

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I guess the difference is that you need to organize and heard 40 stray cats and have them all sit and roll over correctly. It’s just a pain. The content is hard because it has actual gear checks that make content impossible until you have certain gear.

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Yeah. “Hard” is subjective, and the difficulty of Classic raiding is not the mechanics. It’s the logistics.

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I played both. I think the word harder is wrong, it’s different. It focuses on very different aspects of play.

In classic it’s hard to find the time to clear sunken temple. The fights are big gear checks the first time you go in there. Everything felt like a skill/gear check while leveling. Having a kill order, waiting for sunders, stupid lazy DPS died much more often.

You couldn’t just stand in the fire and hope your healer with limitless Mana would keep you alive while.you slap your dick on the keyboard.

Reputation grinds and.special mounts meant something.

Modern wow is not hard beyond high m+ keys and.some mythic fights. Most of the time the game.allows you.to out-gear or have the optimal group comp to overcome any obsticle.

In vanilla things we’re.much more ridged and sometimes you just had to take what you could get. The overall pace is significantly slower and more.thought.goes into pulls even in the open world while leveling.

In bfa or any other somewhat recent expansion, I have not put any thought into what or how much I pull because if somehow I did manage to pull to much, it was easy to escape.

I could go on. Retail has it’s appeal. I like the conveniences, the story, the new updated zones and cinematics.

But I deeply miss the community aspect, the risk vs reward, the slower pace, and the impact everything seemed to have. Ppl are gratzing each other on beta for getting their first helmet, because it means something… And that something is lost right now in retail

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Kinda depends on what lfr…

Molten core? That is kinda give and take. I would say past bwl and beyond its harder.

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With 1.12, it may not be.

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its the same as every expansion and progressive raid is, ony will be new once your and the server are getting attuned to it, so undergeared and all it will be “harder”, but once you out gear the instance its easier

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It’s harder in this sense:

-Raid Co ordination: You need 40 people to run (most) raids.
-Gearing: Gearing for raids requires farming for +resist gear.
-Class composition: Having the right classes for the right encounters, and parties within the raid properly organized for maximum effect.
-Time: Raid prep, including consumable farming and world buffs can take considerable time, effort, and money.
-Attunements: Long quests chains, often requiring multiple 5/10 man dungeon runs, just to even enter the raid.

I guess it’s what you consider “hard” to be. If it is just your PVE sequence and don’t stand in things version of hard, then vanilla is pretty “easy”.

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The mechanics of classic raids are much simpler. Your character also has very few abilities to answer those mechanics. MC wasn’t considered particularly difficult even by the standards of the day until Ragnaros, but much of BWL was a significant difficulty spike. Razorgore looks insultingly simple on the face of it, until you remember there aren’t a thousand sprint abilities, most of your CC doesn’t work, there’s no effective AOE tanking and AOE damage is very low, and there are almost no burst damage/healing/mitigation abilities. Not to mention the numbers tuning is far tighter, even in MC.

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10

Often the most difficult encounters in modern WoW are the “simpler” ones. Bosses have few abilities, but they are more punishing. Yeah, Baron Geddon’s Bomb mechanic isn’t difficult or complicated. But if someone screws up, it can wipe the whole raid.

Remember why people hated Mythic KJ? One person’s minor mistake wiped the whole raid. There are quite a few mechanics like that in vanilla/Classic. I remember hating Razuvious because we had priests who couldn’t figure out how the Mind Control worked.

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In Classic the difficulty was in retaining a 40 man raid group and people consistently skrewing up 1shot mechanics.

In BfA there’s more “difficulty” in playing Bop-It with your raid.

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Remember when they released Molten Core in 2014 with 40 people with the Vanilla difficulty? Didn’t go too well.

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It was incredibly easy.

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The LFR 40 man Molten Core that released for a short time when WoD released was a good indication of how bad players actually are.

I did it one time and it took 6ish hours, with only about 5 people of the original 40 actually sticking through the entire thing.

4 Likes
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Young generation, meet older generation. Oh wait. That’s the way it was 14 years ago also.

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lol, it was 4-5 players expecting 35-36 other players to know every bosses mechanics. Even if they were simple, they didn’t have as many cues like bosses do in modern raids and I myself didn’t remember [banned word by whiny mature? filter] of the 4-5 bosses I killed back then. It was a mess like any LFR run.

What doesn’t work is the pugging nature of LFR, not the game mechanics. Mixing experienced HC players with newby taking it cool is not a great experience.

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Honestly i think it’s much more the annoyance of having to be 40 players to clear a raid than anything else. It’s not really the difficulty that is the problem.

Love vanilla, but never really enjoyed that side of raid. They could make them all 25-mans and keep the fight has complicated and the result would be the same in my opinions.

No matter how many you are, there is alway someone that will screw up here and then lol

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:thinking:

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Casual/medium sized guilds struggled through raids back then just as they do now. I remember my guild struggling to beat the first boss in ZG.

Don’t listen to people who say it was always easy. It wasn’t for most guilds

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I’m reffering to all the colorful circles on the ground showing where to stand and not stand. Those anticipation mechanics are very useful to new players even if the execution itself is hard.

1 Like